Jerry J. Min

Do governments treat foreign investors fairly when enforcing regulations? Politicians may relax enforcement for foreign-owned firms that threaten exit. They may also favor domestic firms. I argue that, when politicians instead value regulatory stringency and are not protectionist, foreign-owned firms can still face discrimination: an information-driven bias by bureaucratic regulators. Bureaucrats enforce regulations under imperfect information about compliance. External ownership—foreign or domestic non-local—may signal unfamiliarity with local regulations and noncompliance. Regulators therefore target externally owned firms for extra scrutiny, such as inspections, though not harsher penalties. I examine U.S. environmental regulation, where states conduct most enforcement. I link enforcement records to ownership data on 2.4 million plants since 1989. Plants face more scrutiny after being acquired by foreign and domestic out-of-state companies, not by in-state ones. This bias concentrates in Democratic strongholds, where politicians value regulatory stringency. Penalty decisions show no ownership bias but favor campaign donors. Bureaucrats’ information-driven bias, not protectionism, drives discrimination against foreign investors.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) and migrant workers earn income abroad that both home and host states can tax. To avoid double taxation, countries have signed over 4,500 bilateral tax treaties (BTTs). BTTs limit the host state’s taxing right on each overlapping tax base and allow the home state to tax the remainder. Many argue that BTTs increasingly restrict host taxing rights, undermining developing countries’ ability to tax MNCs and facilitating tax evasion. When and why do states accept lower host taxing rights? I argue that democracies and left-wing governments selectively concede host taxing rights to attract foreign firms’ business and investment. I construct the first global dataset of BTT contents, coding 20 provisions in over 4,000 treaties to quantify these rights across tax bases. I find that democracies across the ideological spectrum, as well as left-wing nondemocracies, grant lower host taxing rights—but only on incomes and payments generated exclusively by foreign firms, not on other bases such as foreign individuals’ income or domestic firms’ outgoing payments. The rise of global tax evasion reflects uneven government preferences, not merely uniform pressures from the treaty regime, and the left’s conventional preference for domestic taxation does not extend to global taxation.

Scholars frequently use nationalism to explain opposition to globalization but overlook nationalism’s multiple dimensions. I distinguish national pride from national chauvinism and argue that they are distinct predispositions with contrasting effects: national chauvinism drives opposition to globalization, whereas national pride fosters support. I examine all public opinion surveys measuring both nationalist predispositions alongside globalization preferences, covering 46 developed and developing countries from 1994 to 2025. Higher-income and more educated individuals exhibit weaker national chauvinism but similar or greater national pride. Those high in national pride but low in national chauvinism are consistently more supportive of free trade, foreign direct investment, immigration, and international organizations, even after adjusting for economic self-interest. An original U.S. survey experiment and U.K. survey evidence illuminate the mechanism: chauvinism heightens, while pride dampens, sensitivity to a foreign country’s relative gains from globalization because the two predispositions differ in their orientations toward group status.